GeoNet Web Feature Service

This application provides basic functionality for a Web Feature Service (WFS) which allows advanced searches on the GeoNet earthquake catalogue. WFS is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard to allow web-based access to geographical data.

We've left the WFS service fairly unrestricted and added some caching to make it perform well. However, we have finite resources, so if we find it getting overloaded we may need to reduce the service. Help us to keep it as open as possible by not abusing it. If you want to make a lot of requests to the WFS please get in touch with us first. We use GeoServer, an open source server, to provide the WFS.

Below are some sample queries for retrieving earthquake data from the WFS in CSV, JSON, GML and KML formats.

Basic Queries

The Last 50 Quakes

The earthquake catalogue is stored so that the most recent data is returned first. You can easily retrieve the last 50 quakes in the New Zealand region in a variety of formats:

KML

All Quakes

You can retrieve all quakes in any of the above formats by dropping the maxFeatures parameter. Note: This will generate a huge file. At 1 September 2012 there were over 436,000 quakes in the catalogue and this grows at about 20,000 quakes per year. Consider the capabilities of your target system before grabbing all the quakes, for example Google Maps has a limit of 1,000 features.

All quakes in CSV format

Depths and magnitudes

Two earthquakes in our catalogue have an unknown depth represented by -9 km.

Many earthquakes have undetermined magnitudes represented by -9.0. This is either because:

No reliable estimate can be made from these pre-instrumental events, though they will have been felt; or

Insufficient stations calibrated for magnitude recorded the earthquake.

Complex Queries and Filtering

You can make more complex queries using Contextual Query Language (CQL) to filter the results. Some examples are show below. The parameters and the output format can be adjusted in the URL. Also, see the CQL specification and the GeoServer CQL tutorial.

Note: when filtering with spatial queries filter on the origin_geom point type. The longitude and latitude columns are extracted from the origin_geom and provided in the output as a convenience for CSV users.